7 ms·

Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is a real prick who enjoys wasting taxpayers money trying to prosecute an innocent man who has already had his life ruined because of inappro

• rayiner 11y ago
  I don't agree. Aleynikov did not win on the aspects of the case that folks in the tech industry rallied around (e.g. copying open source code). He won on narrow issues of statutory construction: 1) The National Stolen Property Act does not extend to intangible property; 2) The Economic Espionage Act does not encompass code used internally for commercial purposes, only code sold or licensed in commerce; 3) New York's law against unlawful use of secret scientific material did not apply because trading code wasn't "scientific material." I think Vance should have left well enough alone after the first prosecution failed, and the New York "scientific material" charge was clearly the weakest of the three. But the federal prosecution was perfectly reasonable. The statutes at issue were intended to make that sort of conduct illegal. But they hadn't been updated for the digital era. Had Aleynikov made photocopies of the code instead of uploading it, the first conviction would have been upheld.
  • nkassis 11y ago
    But at this point what is the goal of continuing this process? What can the state gain from further prosecutions?
    • rayiner 11y ago
      Nothing. I think the prosecutors should have taken their lumps and gone home after the Second Circuit ruling.
      • fineman 11y ago
        What lumps? That's the problem.
  • jsprogrammer 11y ago
    The case was so perfectly reasonable the prosecutor failed to find relevant statute and instead offered up no relevance and caused an innocent man to suffer greatly?
    • tedunangst 11y ago
      The fact that the statutes were quickly changed to make his actions illegal could be considered evidence it was generally thought that the previous statutes did apply.
      • jdmichal 11y ago
        To add to that, the name of the passed act is the "Theft of Trade Secrets Clarification Act of 2012". (Emphasis mine.) My personal opinion is that Aleynikov violated the intent of the law, but not the wording. He basically got off on a technicality, a "bug" in the law that was quickly patched afterwards.
      • fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
        I would call it evidence that GS lives in a representative democracy.
    • rhino369 11y ago
      It's not like the prosecutor missed or misread an unambiguous statute. There was essentially a loophole in one of the statutes that if read narrowly suggested the trade secret had to be about a product put into commerce. The court found that the code was for an internal goldman sachs service, not a product. And the other statute on which the prosecutor lost was because the court didn't believe code on a usb was a "good." But if it had printed on paper it would have counted. A sort of stupid distinction. The prosecutors lost on two narrow statutory interpretations. It happens and it isn't some sort of negligence. Had he stolen the code from Windows division of Microsoft or had he printed it on paper he'd be guilty.
      • jsprogrammer 11y ago
        So Goldman got Federal prosecutors to prosecute a person for violations of commerce law where Goldman was performing no commerce? Sounds like trumped up bullshit, actually. According to Wikipedia, this guy was also pursued by the State of New York after being released from jail (since he did nothing wrong) on the same conduct and lost his double jeopardy appeal because a State judge claimed New York was a sovereign entity from the US Federal government and so his constitutional right to not be tried multiple times for the same behavior does not exist. The State of New York also ultimately lost by failing to show actual violation of claimed statute.
  • cwp 11y ago
    So, by "narrow issues of statutory construction," you mean the laws he was charged with breaking don't actually apply to what he did? I wouldn't go so far as to call him "innocent", but it sounds to me like his defence is perfectly reasonable. What he did may have been a breach of contract, copyright, and common decency, but it wasn't illegal. And given the way Goldman is clearly out to get him, and the abuse of power on display by both the federal and state prosecutors, he's the least dirty of all the parties involved.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • marcoperaza 11y ago
      This guy was probably getting a fat paycheck during his time at GS, and then when he left he tried to take some of the code that he worked on. It's long been illegal to take intellectual property (even if you made it) from your employer. But to make a law, you have to define things like "take", to exclude the case of an employee taking home his work to be more productive, which may be against company policy but shouldn't be illegal. Inevitably, the law fails to capture the full complexity of the universe and ambiguities are resolved in court. There's nothing wrong about the government and damaged party pursuing charges in cases where the law is ambiguous. That's what courts are for. When the federal courts ruled that federal law didn't cover Sergey's actions, the New York state prosecutor thought that a unique element of New York law might make things different in state court. Nothing wrong with that.
  • joesmo 11y ago
    Regardless of why he won, the fact that he did win at the federal level and would serve no time even if convicted in NY clearly shows that Vance just wanted the conviction for his own selfish purposes. Probably for his conviction numbers. It does not serve society, only its detriment.
• tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  It's the fact the prosecutors office is political that's the problem, not one individual.
  • javajosh 11y ago
    "Hey man, I don't make the rules." I'm sure more than one guard said and thought this at Auschwitz. And it's a pernicious problem in complex, political society, a rationalization that let's people do their jobs, even when they suspect that it's wrong. Personal accountability is a good thing, and at the very least we shouldn't be repeating the whole "hey, they didn't make the rules" post hoc rationalization on people. Vance could have said no to pressure. The fact that he didn't is a very individual problem.
    • dikaiosune 11y ago
      Godwin, anyone? Surely we have better analogies to show that this political behavior is shortsighted than to compare political prosecutions (for vaguely sketchy actions) to mass murder.
      • fineman 11y ago
        No, it's actually more than appropriate to point it out because the point is that diffusion of responsibility easily ends up (to those involved) justifying mass murder. That shows that it of course justifies everything lesser to them as well. And, it smokes out the Godwin trolls whose sole "contribution" is taking offense to everything.
    • tonyedgecombe 11y ago
      All very nice but relying on the character of an individual clearly didn't work in this case.
      • javajosh 11y ago
        It's a form of punishment that, just like corporeal punishment, hopefully serves as a deterrent to future misdeeds.